The wireless Internet has arrived – and now the sky's the limit.
We stand at the brink of a transformation. It is a moment that echoes the birth of the Internet in the mid-'70s, when the radical pioneers of computer networking - machines talking to each other! - hijacked the telephone system with their first digital hellos. Or that jaw-dropper a decade later when the FCC official whose job it was to track the growth of communications networks suddenly realized that his neat tabulation of local and long-distance had been made moot by the unforeseen rise of local-area networks: an unregulated, unmonitored, uncontrollable phenomenon of the upstart PC industry that would soon shake the telecom world. Or the arrival of the Web browser, which blew millions of minds, making a mouseclick feel like teleportation.
This time it is not wires but the air between them that is being transformed. Over the past three years, a wireless technology has arrived with the power to totally change the game. It's a way to give the Internet wing without licenses, permission, or even fees. In a world where we've been conditioned to wait for cell phone carriers to bring us the future, this anarchy of the airwaves is as liberating as the first PCs - a street-level uprising with the power to change everything.
The technology is Wi-Fi, and it's the first blast in a revolution, called open spectrum, that will drive the Internet to the next stage in its colonization of the globe. Like the Net itself, Wi-Fi was confined to technical circles for years before exploding into the mainstream, seemingly out of nowhere. Over the past two years, it's become one of the fastest-growing electronics technologies in history.
What makes the new standard so alluring? Wi-Fi is cheap, powerful, and, most important, it works. A box the size of a paperback, and costing no more than dinner for two, magically distributes broadband Internet to an area the size of a football field. A card no larger than a matchbook receives it. The next laptop you buy will probably have Wi-Fi built in. Wires may soon be for power alone.
But the appeal goes deeper. Wi-Fi represents a fundamentally different approach to the airwaves that could lead to a new era of wireless policy. Like other open spectrum technologies rising in its wake, Wi-Fi is a way to use the handful of frequencies set aside for unrestricted consumer use. That's true of the old CB radio, too, but unlike the trucker channels Wi-Fi is digital and smart enough to avoid congestion. After 100 years of regulations that assumed serious wireless technologies were fragile and in need of protection by monopolies on exclusive frequencies (making spectrum the most valuable commodity of the information age), Wi-Fi is fully capable of protecting itself. It has turned the airwaves into a commons without tragedy, and turned the economics of wireless on its head.
Among the geeks, Wi-Fi has become a fascination, a glimpse of the future of the Internet. Like the Web, it's open, unregulated, and free. It doesn't require a loyalty oath to some corporate behemoth. Anyone can deploy it, and millions have. For many it's an epiphany - the unforgettable impact of being in the presence of something important and new.
No one has been more startled by all of this than the big cellular companies, which paid dearly for transmission rights just a few years ago. Flush with the success of digital phones, they expected the next big thing to emerge the same way. US firms were focused on catching up with their European rivals, who in turn were obsessed with the prospect of ruling the next great technology era (take that, Silicon Valley!) with so-called 3G networks, which would offer multimedia on a new generation of do-everything smartphones. But the 3G dream was already in trouble. The technology wasn't working well, and amid the telecom bust, the $100 billion European carriers borrowed for spectrum licenses was starting to seem like a colossal mistake.
Then came a bolt out of the ether: Consumers realized there was a way to get wireless Internet that didn't require phone companies at all. Wi-Fi had arrived, and it did what it promised right out of the box. Cheap Wi-Fi packages started showing up on the shelves of Wal-Mart and Best Buy, and they sold in remarkable numbers: 12 million units last year, and on pace to double that this year.
What's extraordinary about this boom is that it's an authentic grassroots phenomenon, happening in the home even faster than in the office. Companies are cautious about the security implications of a network that goes through walls and into the street, but most home users are too dazzled to care. Anyone with a broadband connection can plug a $100 access point into a cable modem or DSL box, slip a $60 card into a laptop, and suddenly have that most fabled of tech ambitions: Internet everywhere, or at least everywhere around the house. Stream video from the couch, surf in bed, email in the backyard, all at lightning speed. How many other technologies leave even hardened gadget vets grinning with amazement?
And that's just the beginning. We are starting to see the next phase of the Wi-Fi movement: the rise of public networks. Already there are thousands of open-access hot spots across the country, everywhere from Starbucks and airports to city parks. Others are ad hoc community nets, such as neighboring apartment dwellers using Wi-Fi to share a broadband connection. Tens of thousands more are accidental, leaking out of private homes or offices and often free for passersby to hitchhike on. With prices for Wi-Fi equipment continuing to plummet, it's just a matter of time before the scattering of Wi-Fi dots on city maps grow dense and then overlap.
In the years ahead, Wi-Fi will become a universal standard, found everywhere in the electronics world. It will show up in consumer electronics devices, from videogame consoles to music players. Cell phones will have it, as will PDAs and digital cameras. Any PC bought in a year or so will instantly become the hub of a wireless network, simply by turning it on. The numbers will quickly reach true mass-market levels: an estimated 99 million people with Wi-Fi by 2006, according to Gartner.
All of this amounts to an inversion of the usual adoption cycle, where big companies must build communications infrastructures to encourage consumers to jump on new technologies (as was the case with cell phones). Wi-Fi is becoming ubiquitous for its own reasons. The question is, what networks and services will arise to capitalize on it? Rather than "build it and they will come," the mantra is "they're already here, now build it!"
But build what, exactly? Here are the next four big fronts in the Wi-Fi invasion.
Making it work everywhere. Today the gap between a cell phone experience and Wi-Fi is huge. With a phone, it's usually safe to assume you've got a signal; with Wi-Fi it's almost always safe to assume you don't. Even in the presence of a hot spot (and there are few good ways to know you are, short of opening your laptop and "sniffing" for it), odds are you won't be able to log on, because it's either a private network or a commercial one that requires a subscription. Even places that advertise access, such as hotels and airports, often have it just in the lobby or at certain gates.
Several companies are working on key chains, cards, and pendants that will glow in the presence of a Wi-Fi signal, which is a start (especially if they are smart enough to identify only the networks you can log on to). Cell phones could do the same. But until commercial hot spots are widespread and roaming agreements are in place between them, public Wi-Fi will continue to be more like the Internet café experience, where you have to seek out access, than the cell phone experience, where it finds you. Companies such as Boingo and Cometa are aiming to achieve this, but it's a big world out there. Expect a few more years of frustration.
Unwiring the living room. Digital media, from MP3 to DVD, is taking over, but the equipment in most homes is still largely analog. Consumer electronics makers have been unable to come up with a common digital standard to link gear, and even if they did, few consumers want to string networking cable under their couch.
Wi-Fi can break this logjam and become the common link that ties together music, video, and even phones around the house, automatically and effortlessly. Then the notion of a central entertainment server, which records TV, stores music and video, and plays it back on any screen in the house, will finally take off. Once the living room is a wirelessly networked digital media hub, the long-awaited era of Internet video may arrive, kicking broadband demand into high gear.
Using Wi-Fi to cross the last mile. As consumer electronics start to ship with wireless networking built in, demand will skyrocket for the broadband connections to make it all worthwhile. Which could be another opportunity for Wi-Fi. Currently, getting broadband at home is, at best, an uninspiring choice between the phone company and the cable company - if it's available at all.
Wi-Fi hot spots mounted on lampposts or telephone poles, with directional antennas to extend their range and avoid congestion, could offer as good or better service. And the economies of scale of a truly mainstream technology could make it far cheaper than other wireless options. Also, neighborhood Wi-Fi "umbrellas" could employ the miles of unused fiber-optic cable that are a legacy of the telecom bubble, effectively bridging the otherwise expensive "last mile" from the main telecom networks to individual homes.
Converging with the cell phone. Finally, once there's widespread Wi-Fi in the home, the neighborhood, and enough public spaces, wireless convergence starts to make sense. Today, it's not uncommon to find consumers who are fully wireless: a cell phone outside the home, cordless phones within, and a Wi-Fi network for data. Yet, while some of these devices share the same frequencies (cordless phones and Wi-Fi both use the 2.4-GHz and 5-GHz bands), they are based on different standards and can't talk to each other.
Bringing them together is just a matter of time. Wi-Fi, especially in higher-speed incarnations, is as capable of transmitting voice as any cordless phone, and because calls travel over the Internet rather than over a phone network, they are far cheaper. By the same token, several companies are planning to add Wi-Fi to cell phones, allowing users to make calls over the Internet when in Wi-Fi range. The dream to emerge from this is a single device that moves seamlessly from home to road, using the best network available wherever it is.
It's this vision of convergence that has the smarter telcos reconsidering their 3G plans in light of the Wi-Fi boom. There are many parts that still must come together, but it is not hard to imagine a day when the Internet really is everywhere, just in different strengths and price tiers depending on the cost of the underlying infrastructure. Your phone might be free to use at home and in the office, cheap in your neighborhood and downtown, free again at a café trying to boost business, and relatively expensive on the highway. Most of those would be Wi-Fi networks, with cell phone service as a seamless but costly fallback, like analog roaming is for digital phones today.
Wi-Fi is just a few years old - still in its first blush of success. No doubt some of the above will prove impractical, and problems from security to interference will arise to slow its growth. But it has already proven gloriously disruptive, as all great technologies are. Will it shake the cell phone industry? We don't yet know. But the golden age of wireless has only just begun. Give it time.
Wi-Fi Explained Wireless networking comes in a variety of flavors, all of them identified by a string of numbers and letters only a librarian could love. Beware: Not all standards are created equal.
802.11b The standard that started it all. Seeking to invent a speedy way to send data via unlicensed airwaves, engineers working on a standard for wireless local-area networks borrowed from existing technologies - Ethernet's data packets, the Internet's routing protocols, and spread spectrum's use of many channels within a frequency band. The result is information delivered at speeds up to 11 Mbps in the 2.4-GHz band, and at a range of about 300 feet. In 1999, an industry group wisely decided to give it a more friendly name and settled on the retro-chic Wi-Fi, for wireless fidelity.
802.11a Finalized four years ago, 802.11a works in the 5- to 6-GHz band at speeds of up to 54 Mbps. Products based on the standard were first introduced in late 2001. Its strengths: high speed and lower risk of radio frequency interference than either 802.11b or 802.11g. Its weakness: a is incompatible with the more popular b and the emerging g, because it strayed from the 2.4-GHz band. As a result, some manufacturers have quit building products for it. But as WLANs proliferate, it could prove essential to serving large populations in concentrated area, such as downtowns, universities, and business centers.
802.11g The much-anticipated 802.11g has already been revised six times; approval is expected in mid-2003. Why all the excitement? It promises complete interoperability with b and transmission rates up to five times faster in the same 2.4-GHz band. Early products are already on the market from Wi-Fi heavyweights such as Apple, Linksys, Netgear, and D-Link. Among the challenges for g: higher vulnerability to radio frequency interference from other 2.4-GHz devices, such as late-generation cordless phones.
Free the Air! As big as it is, Wi-Fi is just the start of something even bigger: a set of "open spectrum" technologies that could rewrite the rules of the airwaves, reversing a century of regulatory policy and enabling an explosion of new wireless devices and services.
The notion that wireless users, like airplanes in a landing pattern, need to be fenced off by themselves is an anachronism, a throwback to the days of analog. Radio signals are not like physical objects, which cannot occupy the same space at the same time without a crunch. Electromagnetic waves pass through one another effortlessly, and they can be extracted from a sea of other signals, even on the same frequency bands. The trick is knowing what you're looking for.
Wired Illustrator
Open spectrum technologies cut through the noise rather than requiring regulatory protection from interference. One key technique is spread spectrum, a way to transmit over many frequencies simultaneously; if some channels are blocked, others will let data through. Wi-Fi spreads its signal over 14 channels on the 2.4-GHz band.
Two technologies have made that easier. The first is spread spectrum, which is a way of scattering a transmission around over many narrow frequencies, shotgun-style. Even if some are drowned out by interference, others will still get through - noise is rarely evenly distributed. And because the receiver knows the sequence of frequencies that the transmissions will be coming in, it can ignore those arriving at different times. The second is digital radio, which can break up a transmission into Internet-like packets with addresses. DR receivers pay attention only to the packets meant for them, allowing many devices to use the same frequencies. Add error correction and the ability to resend any part of a message that is lost, and you have radios that can cut through the noisiest environments and share airwaves with hundreds of nearby transmitters.
On the back of the Wi-Fi phenomenon, a growing cadre of open spectrum activists are now pushing for wholesale changes in telecom regulation, extending the same principles to the rest of the wireless world. How much lower would your cell phone bill be if carriers didn't spend billions for licenses? How much closer would you be to broadband Internet in your pocket? The only thing that has kept the venerable landline alive for so long is the assumption that the airwaves were too limited to be shared by all. Once we thought the same about the Internet itself. - C.A.
People to Watch Introducing the innovators, rebels, and policymakers who are leading the wireless revolution.
Anthony Townsend and Terry Schmidt – the pirates The most famous Wi-Fi node in the world, in midtown Manhattan's Bryant Park, went live last June, switched on by Anthony Townsend, who teaches urban planning at NYU, and his free-wireless comrade, Terry Schmidt. By the end of the summer, the network was drawing 50-plus users a day and had transformed the duo's organization, NYCwireless, from a bunch of bandwidth pirates into a respected champion of public access. Their pitch: Any neighborhood can go wireless, for as little as $1,000. "Bryant Park spends almost as much on rat poison every year," says Schmidt. The two are now at work on a new, eight-node "walking network" that will put every part of downtown within a five-minute walk of free Wi-Fi. - Lucas Graves
Sky Dayton – the surfer If it worked once, Sky Dayton figures, it could work again. So he modeled his new Boingo Wireless on EarthLink, the Internet service provider he founded in 1994: String together hundreds of local access providers into a seamless network, then share the revenue. A year in, Boingo claims to have about 1,200 Wi-Fi hot spots in 300 cities throughout 46 states. Boasts Dayton, "We're the first company to make it easy for anyone to find and connect to a huge network of hot spots." Nipping at his heels: Cometa Networks, a joint venture of AT&T, Intel, and IBM; AT&T Wireless, a partnership with wireless ISP Wayport; and fast-growing Wi-Fi service providers. - Mark Frauenfelder
Teresa Meng – the professor Five years ago, Stanford electrical engineering professor Teresa Meng founded Atheros to produce her groundbreaking Radio-on-a-Chip - a marvel of integration and miniaturization that cornered the market on 802.11a wireless equipment. But as demand rose for the earlier standard, 802.11b, Atheros created a single, low-cost chipset that worked with both standards, as well as the emerging 802.11g. Now the company's improving output power to extend the chip's range. Meanwhile, Meng continues her prize-winning research in low-power circuit design, wireless communication, and biosignal processing. "Five or ten years from now, we won't worry about communication with wires," she says. "You'll just open your laptop or PDA and the data will be there." - Joseph Portera
Ken Biba – the distance runner Ken Biba helped develop TCP, the connection protocol at the heart of the Internet. Now, as CEO of Vivato, he's again at the center of a revolution. So far, Wi-Fi has been confined to local networks, because its limited range means you'd need up to 2,000 nodes to cover, say, a university campus. But Vivato's switching technology - the first in the industry - extends reach from roughly 30 feet to 4 miles. You'd need just 30 to 50 Vivato switches to turn all of Dartmouth into a hot spot. And it may go further than that. "Data can't travel on a voice network, but voice can travel on a data network," says Biba. Watch out, Grandma Bells. - Jessie Scanlon
Michael Powell – the man If you're a regulator who hates to regulate, it doesn't get any better than Wi-Fi. To FCC chief Michael Powell, the use of unlicensed spectrum for free-floating Internet access is "a demonstration of the wonderful unintended consequences of less government intrusion." Now the commission is looking at unused television spectrum: If there's no Channel 7 in Cincinnati, why not free up the bandwidth? Broadcasters may balk, but Powell thinks everyone will benefit eventually. Meanwhile, he's set up hot spots in the FCC itself. "We're not quite Starbucks," he quips, "but it's still pretty neat." - Frank Rose
George Allen and Barbara Boxer – the senators George Allen is a pro-life, pro-gun Republican conservative from Virginia. Democrat Barbara Boxer is a two-fisted California liberal. But the two senators have forged an alliance over a single issue: getting wireless broadband into businesses and homes. In January, Allen (whose state includes the Dulles technology corridor) and Boxer (who represents Silicon Valley) unveiled the Jumpstart Broadband Act of 2003, which would force the FCC to make unlicensed 5-GHz spectrum available. The bill got a boost in February, when the Department of Defense, which currently controls that range, announced an agreement with tech companies to relinquish some of the spectrum. - Matt Bai
Dewayne Hendricks – the ultrawideband cowboy Entrepreneur Dewayne Hendricks helped bring wireless broadband access to Mongolia, to Native American reservations, and most recently to isolated schools in Thailand. A member of the FCC's prestigious Technological Advisory Council, he says it's time to wrest control of the airwaves from the government. And he's looking beyond Wi-Fi to technologies like ultrawideband, cognitive (software-defined) radio, and dense-packet radio topologies that could soon make licensing unnecessary. Consider the benefits: wireless access for a nearly unlimited number of people, choreographed by smart software in their devices, not by Beltway bureaucrats. - Brent Hurtig
Doug Karl – the apple farmer Doug Karl invented the Apple AirPort, built the first device to translate Ethernet input into wireless output, and wrote access point software licensed to companies like Sony, Dell, and IBM. He is also founder and president of KarlNet, a growing Dublin, Ohio-based company whose flagship product is TurboCell - a supercharged protocol that can be "flashed" into inexpensive Wi-Fi gear, optimizing it for high-performance, long-range use outdoors. The improvement is especially useful in rural areas, where access points can provide entire communities with broadband. An answer to the last-mile problem? "It's more like the last 20 miles," he says. - Joseph Portera
Don Samuelson – the builder The information revolution mostly skipped over southwestern Chicago, where grinding poverty makes high technology seem like a luxury. But by using relatively inexpensive wireless networks, real estate developer Don Samuelson plans to connect the part of town to the rest of the world. A former assistant director of the Illinois Housing Development Authority, Samuelson owns or manages more than 2,000 units of low-income housing in the area. With $50,000 worth of mostly donated Motorola equipment, he aims to make southwestern Chicago broadband-accessible. His first project: an antenna atop his New Englewood Terrace apartment building to provide broadband access over a 10-mile radius. - Alex Ulam
David Reed – the visionary In David Reed's perfect world, there'd be no cell phone towers. The MIT Media Lab adjunct professor envisions wireless devices communicating with one another, acting like tiny transmitters. Wireless spectrum, he says, is "the ultimate renewable resource," and because radio signals are made of photons that can pass through each other, it's also "expandable and scalable without bound." Reed and fellow researcher Andy Lippman founded the Viral Communications project to explore how cooperating devices could one day make cellular carriers, cable companies, and ISPs obsolete. "We expect everything to be able to connect to everything else," says Reed, who also helped develop the original Internet protocols. "And we don't want to pay a monthly fee for each device." - Mark Frauenfelder
